Very little to-day remains, thanks to this catastrophe,—thanks, above all, to the successive restorations… — Victor Hugo
Very little to-day remains, thanks to this catastrophe,—thanks, above all, to the successive restorations which have completed what it spared, —very little remains of that first dwelling of the kings of France,—of that elder palace of the Louvre, already so old in the time of Philip the Handsome, that they sought there for the traces of the magnificent buildings erected by King Robert and described by Helgaldus. Nearly everything has disappeared.... Where is the staircase, from which Charles VI. promulgated his edict of pardon? the slab where Marcel cut the throats of Robert de Clermont and the Marshal of Champagne, in the presence of the dauphin? ... and the stone lion, which stood at the door, with lowered head and tail between his legs, like the lions on the throne of Solomon, in the humiliated attitude which befits force in the presence of justice?
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When they tried to detach this skeleton from the one it embraced, it crumbled to dust.
Oh, why am I not of stone, like you?
It was, in truth, a spectacle worthy of a more intelligent spectator than Phœbus, to see how these beautiful maidens, with their envenomed and angry tongues, wound, serpent-like, and glided and writhed around the street dancer. They were cruel and graceful; they searched and rummaged maliciously in her poor and silly toilet of spangles and tinsel. There was no end to their laughter, irony, and humiliation. Sarcasms rained down upon the gypsy, and haughty condescension and malevolent looks. One would have thought they were young Roman dames thrusting golden pins into the breast of a beautiful slave. One would have pronounced them elegant greyhounds, circling, with inflated nostrils, round a poor woodland fawn, whom the glance of their master forbade them to devour.
